ROGER SIMON: The New York Times’ Rubio Derangement Syndrome. “It took several years of George W. Bush’s presidency for the mainstream media to develop full-blown Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS), but The New York Times – the MSM’s very flagship – seems to have contracted Rubio Derangement Syndrome (RDS) over a year before there is even a Republican nominee, let alone a sitting president.”
Archive for 2015
June 10, 2015
SPREADING ACROSS BRITISH UNIVERSITIES: MEN’S RIGHTS SOCIETIES.
Breitbart columnist and right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopolous, backs Adam’s new project.
He told The Tab: “It doesn’t surprise me to see men’s rights organisations springing up on campuses. Many young men rightly feel as though society is architected against them. Nowhere is this more true than at uni.
“A wacky, extremist brand of feminism is in vogue at universities on both sides of the Atlantic today, concerned with ‘patriarchy,’ policing ‘micro-aggressions,’ transgender pronouns, demanding ‘safe spaces’ for imagined traumas and demeaning and ridiculing men at every opportunity.
“Feminists have even succeeded in establishing compulsory “consent classes” at many colleges, the message of which is: men, you are all potential rapists. That’s appalling: they should be scrapped.
“Sadly, academia being what it is, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of these new men’s rights groups banned from campus on the spurious grounds that they make women feel ‘unsafe.’
“Look out for words like ‘harassment,’ ‘abuse and ‘safety’: these are classic strategies used by wacko lefty groups to ban people whose opinions they find challenging, or whose factual statements these bonkers activists are incapable of refuting.”
Yeah, pretty much.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Reason Magazine Subpoena Stomps on Free Speech.
Wielding subpoenas demanding information on anonymous commenters, the government is harassing a respected journalism site that dissents from its policies. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York claims these comments could constitute violent threats, even though they’re clearly hyperbolic political rhetoric.
This is happening in America — weirdly, to a site I founded, and one whose commenters often earned my public contempt.
Los Angeles legal blogger Ken White has obtained a grand jury subpoena issued to Reason.com, the online home of the libertarian magazine I edited throughout the 1990s. The subpoena seeks information about commenters who posted in response to an article by the site’s editor Nick Gillespie about the letter that Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht wrote to Judge Katherine B. Forrest before she sentenced him to life in prison without parole. Ulbricht was convicted of seven felony charges, included conspiracies to traffic in narcotics and launder money, and faced a minimum sentence of 20 years in prison. The letter was an appeal for leniency.
They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney, constitution-trampling prosecutors would be attacking free speech. And they were right!
And here’s more from TechDirt.
June 9, 2015
ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: American Fighting in Christian Militia Against ISIS Reacts to Obama’s No ‘Complete Strategy’ Comment. “If you’re this far into something and you haven’t come up with a complete strategy, you have no strategy.”
WSJ LAW BLOG: Reason Magazine Subpoenaed Over Reader Comments about Silk Road Judge. “Reason.com, the website for the monthly print magazine Reason, has been critical of the Justice Department and Judge Forrest.”
LAWPROF EUGENE KONTOROVICH 1, FRENCH DIPLOMAT GERARD ARAUD 0:
Perhaps the most instructive aspect of this was the reaction of Amb. Araud, when I pointed out to him that his legal claim is baseless, and squarely contradicted by France’s own courts in recent decisions involving Israel, which held the Geneva Conventions flatly inapplicable to private companies. It is also contradicted by the opinions the U.N. Security Council Legal Advisor, the EU Parliament’s legal advisor, and the U.K. Supreme Court, and more. . . .
Amb. Araud responded to my question by revealing that he had no idea one of his country’s largest companies was engaged in an major project that, by his account, is a war crime.
The Ambassador, after blocking me, revealed that his international law claims are not really about international law.
Most talk of “international law” isn’t.
TRUE: Fears, Not Facts, Support G.M.O.-Free Food. “Despite myriad assurances from scientists that foods containing genetically modified ingredients are safe to eat, consumers are likely to see more and more products labeled “G.M.O.-free” in the not-too-distant future. As happened with the explosion of gluten-free products, food companies are quick to cash in on what they believe consumers want regardless of whether it is scientifically justified.” It’s a marketing gimmick.
AT AMAZON, try a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime. I was talking to one of my students a while back about how she’s abandoned Pandora for Amazon’s free streaming music.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Obama Administration Opens Door For More Student-Debt Forgiveness, Including Law School Loans. “The forgiveness push, though, would reach far beyond Corinthian and even the for-profit school sector. Officials said that under the emerging plan, the government will consider forgiving any loans made directly by the government—those held by the majority of the 43 million Americans with student debt—so long as the borrower can document a school persuaded him or her to take out the loan under conditions that would violate state laws.”
Related: The Parable Of The Tulip Subsidy.
I’m afraid that Sanders’ plan is a lot like the tulip subsidy idea that started off this post. It would subsidize the continuation of a useless tradition that has turned into a speculation bubble, prevent the bubble from ever popping, and disincentivize people from figuring out a way to route around the problem, eg replacing the tulips with daffodils. . . .
If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.
Read the whole thing.
THAT SEEMS TO BE THE PATTERN WITH THESE KINDS OF STORIES: Is the Story of a Muslim Woman Insulted by Flight Attendant a Hoax? The printing press should not become a social media rumor mill. I hope the fired flight attendant sues. We’ll learn a lot.
JON GABRIEL: Jerry Seinfeld And The Progressive Comedy Pause. “Tell a joke to a liberal. Between your punchline and his laughter, there is a Progressive Comedy Pause. In this second or two, the liberal will process the joke to make sure he is allowed to laugh. . . . It’s harder to laugh when you’re scared and much of the left is terrified. They know that an inappropriate chuckle, the wrong tweet, or last year’s term for an aggrieved minority can lessen their standing with progressive peers, if not get them fired from a job. Lefties also have turned the negative of humorlessness into the positive of moral superiority.” But nobody respects them. These offendotrons don’t even respect themselves.
I’VE WARNED YOU PEOPLE FOR YEARS, BUT YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN. But now maybe this will convince you. Interstellar!
AT 6 PM EASTERN TONIGHT, I’LL BE ON DANA LOESCH’S SHOW ON BLAZE TV talking about the New York Times and Marco Rubio.
AT AMAZON, $50 Off Select $200 Bosch Orders.
HEALTH: Tuberculosis Case Prompts Search for Patient’s Fellow Airline Passengers. “Health officials are trying to identify people who may have come into contact with a woman who flew from India to Chicago in April and had a type of tuberculosis that is highly resistant to drug treatment. . . . After arriving in Chicago, the woman traveled to Missouri and Tennessee and then returned to Chicago, where she sought treatment at a hospital about seven weeks after she had landed in the United States. The hospital gave a diagnosis of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, and the woman was transported on Friday by special air and ground ambulances to a hospital at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. She is in an isolation room ‘specifically designed for handling patients with respiratory infections, including XDR-TB,’ according to a statement issued by the N.I.H. . . . Compared with most other infectious diseases, even ordinary cases of TB are difficult to treat. Patients have to take several drugs for six to nine months. As its name implies, the extensively drug-resistant version is even worse. According to the C.D.C., only about 30 percent to 50 percent of XDR-TB cases are cured; ordinary forms can almost always be cured.”
POWER: Law Loosens an Efficiency Standard But Boosts Grid Stability.
The story goes like this: Back in 2010, the U.S. government formulated regulations to improve the efficiency of many types of appliances, including electric water heaters. The new standards were slated to go into effect in April of 2015.
This seemed a good idea, at least on the surface. But according to Harshal Upadhye of the Electric Power Research Institute, the regulators involved didn’t appreciate that electric utility companies were keen to use people’s electric water heaters for load management, switching them off remotely to reduce power demand when needed. A water heater is a perfect load to use in this way, because it can store energy in the form of hot water for long periods. It’s sort of like having a big wet battery connected to the electric grid. . . .
That legislation now allows large-capacity electric water heaters to be sold, despite their inefficiency compared to the heat-pump type. But there are provisions to ensure that most, if not all, of those water heaters are used in laudable ways.
For example, it makes it illegal to “unlock” a grid-enabled water heater so that it can be used without being part of a demand-management or thermal-energy storage program. And the government can still bar the sale of such water heaters if it determines that the number of them being sold is 15 or more percent greater than the number of them involved in the kinds of programs they were designed for.
So the lesson should be clear. Jailbreak your iPhone if you want, but don’t jailbreak your grid-interactive water heater or you’ll make it bad for everybody.
You know, I don’t really want anyone else controlling my hot water.
HOW ABOUT THAT: Emails Reveal Jonathan Gruber’s Obamacare Work Was Of ‘Key Political Importance.’ “The biggest takeaway from the emails is that they undermine one claim made by the Obama administration that Gruber was merely a bit player in the development of Obamacare. Described by many as the ‘architect’ of the health-care law, Gruber was thrown under the bus after numerous videos surfaced last year of him bragging that Obamacare was passed because of ‘a lack of transparency’ into the law and because the American people ‘were too stupid’ to realize they were being manipulated into supporting it.”
ROGER SIMON INTERVIEW: Rick Perry: ‘Identify and Eliminate These ISIS Operatives.’
THE ROGER SIMON INTERVIEW: Marco Rubio: ‘Evidence that Iran Wants a Nuclear Weapon.’
THE FIFA SOCCER SCANDAL has repercussions in the Cayman Islands. “David Legge and his wife, Vicki, the publishers of the only daily newspaper in the territory, said Monday that they had left for Fort Lauderdale, Fla., fearing for their safety after the Cayman Islands premier, Alden McLaughlin, described a recent editorial about corruption as ‘treasonous.'”
SELF-DRIVING CARS ARE A BETTER SOLUTION: Take a Shot of This: In-Car Drunkness Detection Systems Being Tested By NHTSA.
TEST: The 2016 Mazda Miata.